“THE JRPG AT THE END OF THE WORLD”

Dude, I straight up didn’t know there were different Limit Breaks the first time I played this game.

I feel an incredible amount of shame typing that now. It’s not like the game hides it. It’s literally one of the options in the pause menu! I have no excuse.

What’s even crazier is that I still got through all of FF7 without a hitch until the very end. I really screwed up everything at Northern Cave. They gave me the Save Point and I used it immediately instead of before Sephiroth. I assumed they would give me another Save Point for some reason? Like I really thought the gimmick of the area was that I would be able to create my own save points. I was wrong.

Well, anyways, I played this on my PlayStation 5 and got to Sephiroth and got my ass kicked so hard that I gave up and turned on cheats to finish the game.

In hindsight, I can only assume that I was probably very drunk and just wanted to finish the game that night.

After my first playthrough I immediately started Final Fantasy VII Remake, and the crazy high production values, wild real-time battle system, and the new soundtrack arrangements blew me away. FF7 became a dim memory.

For my second and most recent playthrough, I opted for the PC version on Steam. I also decided to download a few mods to spice things up a little. Although my final score will not factor in these mods, I’d like to discuss them here.

I used this Steam guide although I opted out of using some suggested mods, specifically any using AI upscaled imagery. Although my stance on AI “art” is that it’s bad, my stance on AI upscaled imagery is that it’s fine, I guess, as long as it doesn’t look like crap. Unfortunately all of the AI upscaled backgrounds/FMVs for Final Fantasy VII look like crap. Doubly so if you choose the 30fps interpolated option which gives a lot of FMVs this ugly fake motion blur effect that makes everything look like it's been smeared in vaseline.

The image quality for the AI upscaled backgrounds/FMVs is also spotty at best, and straight up wrong at worst. “Wrong,” because the intended purpose of AI upscaling is to add clarity and detail, but in this instance the original image actually loses a lot of detail. The sequence where Cloud and Cid escape on the Tiny Bronco, for example, there’s a shot where the Tiny Bronco comes towards the camera – but for some reason, whatever program was used couldn’t interpret the Tiny Bronco as separate from the background, and as a result I couldn’t see the Tiny Bronco until it was already halfway towards the screen.

That, for me, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Don’t use AI upscaled images/videos. Trust me.

Additionally, I decided not to use Echo-S 7, Symphonic Remasters, or Gameplay Tweaks and Cheats (tried to keep the experience as vanilla as possible).

Everything else in this Steam guide is solid. The Ninostyle Chibi / Ninostyle Battle models add a lot of good detail. The Ninostyle Battle models perfectly capture the essence of Tetsuya Nomura's iconic concept art.

My favorite mod was definitely Cosmo Memory, which adds a good amount of ambience, soundscapes, and footsteps that greatly enhanced the overall atmosphere. Strongly recommend playing with this one.

Playing through Final Fantasy VII now, I’m surprised Square has never attempted a more traditional remaster. I assumed FFVII Ever Crisis was Square’s answer to the vocal fraction of the fanbase demanding a more traditional turn-based remaster until I found out that it was a gacha cashgrab. I’ve never touched Ever Crisis but I can definitely understand the perspective that it was created in bad faith, and the fact that it’s also being released in chapters doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in its continued support for the coming years.

But also, using AI upscaling to render the backgrounds/FMVs at 4K is not the “remaster” many online denizens would like you to believe it is. In this case especially, what you’re getting is essentially a glorified pixel smoothing filter.

It’s frustrating too, because they could release a traditional FFVII remaster today, and all would be forgiven. FFVII with Ever Crisis graphics (no gacha), some much-needed QoL improvements for UI, menus, etc. and maybe a toggle between old and new graphics like in the Master Chief Collection. That’s all you’d need.

Anyways, I’m writing this today to tell you that FFVII still holds up.

It’s still a phenomenal game. This was my first Final Fantasy when I played it a few years ago and it immediately made me want to jump into the remake after I’d finished it, which was also a phenomenal game in its own right. It also made me want to jump into FFXVI which was FINE.

To me, this is (almost) the ideal turn-based JRPG. Heavily story-driven, quickly paced, with a battle/magic system that eases you into its complexity over time.

Materia is FFVII’s main attraction and it adds a completely new dimension to abilities and spellcasting. Materia can be assigned to individual characters and has its own discrete leveling systems attached. Have a character with a certain materia equipped and it accrues AP (basically XP for materia) unlocking stronger spells/abilities, additional uses of the same ability, and even more materia once you fully master one.

Again, this is the only true, numbered mainline Final Fantasy game I’ve played (besides FFXVI) so I don't really have any other frame of reference. I’ve heard about the job system in earlier entries and, from what I understand, materia is like an abstraction layer above(below?) that idea – instead of roles, FFVII gives players the freedom to build their own kinds of classes (think Call of Duty multiplayer loadouts if you’re a zoomer like me).

Need a dedicated healer? Give a character the restore materia. Use the heal/revive materia to counteract negative status effects and revive teammates instead of using Phoenix Down. Even better, pair these materia with the All Materia so you can heal/cure/revive all your teammates at once.

Maybe you need a tank? Give a character the Cover materia. If you want to maximize their efficiency, load them with the Counter Attack materia. Better yet, pair them with multiple Counter Attack materia – or use the Counter/Counter Magic materia for additional counter attacks. Pair Counter Attack with 2x/4x cut for maximum efficiency.

Maybe you want a tank AND a healer. Go for it! With the right equipment/materia you can load up on restore materia, and counter attack materia, and if you know what you’re doing, you can even use Added Effect or Elemental materia to imbue your attacks with fire/ice/bolt damage, or a chance to cause Instant Death. The game lets you go crazy with it. Dual class or triple class or quadruple class. Do what you want!

It’s unfortunate that the best materia isn’t available until much later in the game. Every time I wanted to try out a new materia combo, I found myself needing to trek to some odd corner of the world map. I even bred a Golden Chocobo to get Knights of the Round and hardly used it! You don’t get the 2x cut materia until you get a submarine which is at the very end of the game. I wanted to get the Final Attack materia and had to grind at the Battle Square for hours at the Golden Saucer (you’re not allowed to leave, otherwise all the points you earn reset, which is dumb and annoying!) and once I finally got it, I hardly used it! I paired it with Phoenix and then I never died so it saw zero use for the remainder of my playtime. Unfortunate.

Anyways, the materia system pretty much carries the gameplay through to the finish line. It gives every area and each encounter a lot of flavor. Players have to ask themselves, “What are enemies weak to?” and “Should I use the materia I have to give myself an offensive edge, or a defensive advantage?”

It’s telling that there are so many instances where the story necessitates splitting up Scooby-Doo style, kicking party members to the wayside and returning any equipped materia to your inventory. Clearly, the game wants you to experiment with different combinations, and so it frequently scrambles your loadouts to force you into trying out new things.

Now, this… can get a little ridiculous, if I'm being honest. It feels like every few hours you’ll reach another story beat, and then the game hits the materia combo reset button. This wouldn’t be so bad if the materia menu UI was a little cleaner – and this goes back to what I said about a potential FF7 remaster adding some well overdue QoL improvements – as while items can be easily rearranged, materia cannot. This can be doubly annoying if you have multiple materia with the same names, and have to cursor over them to distinguish one from another. There NEEDS to be an easier way for players to navigate this menu.

Overall though, I think the turn-based combat and mechanical complexity on offer here is great! It’s at least varied and freeform enough to not lose its flavor in the fifty-odd hours it took me to get through the main story + a good amount of side content.

One thing that FF7 does well is keeping up its brisk pace. There’s a good amount of regular “dungeon” type areas where enemies will attack the player in random encounters, but for every dungeon there’s usually an associated town/hub where some important story beats occur. Best examples of these I can think of are Wall Market and the Golden Saucer; one is a longer, story-focused section where the main goal is to sneak into Don Corneo’s mansion, the other is a carnival-type hub with a lot of smaller minigames. The ebb and flow of the story and the combat feels natural. Neither element overtakes or overpowers the other.

The story of Final Fantasy VII might also be – genuinely – one of the most profound narratives I’ve experienced in a game. Although many have shared similar sentiments regarding many other games, and although many have also shared similar sentiments regarding this game specifically, there is something remarkable in the experience of Final Fantasy VII that is difficult to put to text.

There’s a million things I could talk about here, but I’ll narrow it down to one:

Cloud Strife. What’s up with this guy?

Literally everything I’d seen/heard about FFVII had led me to believe this guy was just a stoic badass anime pretty boy (and uh, spoiler alert: he is). In reality, dude is just traumatized and suffers from major depersonalization for 90% of the game.

Actually, Cloud Strife might be the best example I can think of when discussing the “character vs avatar” problem in games. I’m not sure what their original idea was back in ‘97 but, to me, letting players name their characters seems like a type of personalization that’s almost inappropriate nowadays. Like naming your Aerith COOLRANCH or something might be funny at the time but hardly ever does it feel like you, the player, have drastically altered the circumstances of the game itself. Sure, she’s COOLRANCH but she looks and talks and acts like Aerith so it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Cloud is an interesting case because he’s the main player character and there’s a lot of interesting dialogue options and in-game choices that give players some sense of control over him. The aloof, uncaring dialogue options usually contain an excessive amount of biting edge – unusually cruel and out-of-character for no reason.

When Biggs asks Cloud (with his dying breath!) if he doesn’t care what happens to the planet, players can choose to respond, “Nope, not interested”.

During the Nibelheim flashback, players can make Cloud go through Tifa’s closet – presumably admitting this to Tifa and the rest of his party as he’s telling this story. It’s super weird, but it’s supposed to be super weird. The game’s not just doing a funny ha-ha pervert Cloud moment (at least not straightforwardly), it’s trying to highlight that it would be really weird for Cloud to do that, and it would be really weird for Cloud to admit he did that, and it would be really weird for Cloud to admit he did that when it doesn’t pertain to what’s happening in the flashback in the first place.

Well, if you’re still reading this, I assume you’ve already played FFVII. I hope you’ve played FFVII already! I’m about to spoil most (if not all) of it.

Before I knew anything about FFVII, I knew that Aerith died. I think I was spoiled by a ScrewAttack Top 10 or something (I found it). I didn’t really care at the time because I was younger and I had zero interest in JRPGs, let alone Final Fantasy. My friend Garrett described Aerith’s death as the “I am your father” moment of video games. Even if you haven’t played the game, you already know it’s coming.

It’s a surreal experience when you’re actually 25 hours deep though. On my first playthrough even, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop – is it going to happen here? Will it happen here? Even on this most recent playthrough, I could feel my stomach tightening when I descended those final stairs.

This is where it happens, I think.

It doesn’t hit me. It’s almost like it washes over me, in waves.

What I didn’t realize then, and what I think is a tremendous storytelling moment that isn’t really part of the conversation anymore, is how the game wrestles control away from the player right before it happens. Previously, Sephiroth forces Cloud to attack Aerith at the Temple of the Ancients. At the Forgotten City, as Cloud approaches Aerith, he also begins to lose control again – although this time, the game won’t continue until the player themselves presses the buttons to attack Aerith.

I mean, it might sound a little silly now. Obviously, you need to interact and keep playing the game to progress. But it’s specifically how the game seems like it wants you – the player – to be the one who delivers the finishing blow, which feels unbelievably and uncharacteristically cruel. When you’re spared of that cruelty, Sephiroth delivering the finishing blow feels only like the inevitable has come to pass. As if nature itself is coming to take its course.

In a meta-sense, Aerith’s death represents both a narrative focal point for both the characters and the players alike. Obviously I wasn’t part of the FFVII fandom during the late 90s (I was literally not born yet when this game was released), but I’m no stranger to reading stories/accounts of people trying to find a way to “save” Aerith from her fate at the hands of Sephiroth. I can’t be 100% certain what the culture was like at the time because I wasn’t there. But I could imagine some players remaining in disbelief, perhaps some fully expecting Aerith to return in some grandiose manner, returning from the dead, or saved in another playthrough if/when the correct prerequisites were met.

There’s something about this line of thinking, that maybe Aerith isn’t really gone for good, comparable to how many handle the actual loss of a loved one. Maybe they’re not really gone. Maybe they’ll come back.

Players know better now. Aerith doesn’t come back. We don’t save her.

The loss doesn’t sting anymore. There was someone there and now there’s not.

Aerith’s death followed hours later by the reunion at the Northern Crater is the perfect one-two punch that TKOs Cloud for the first chunk of Act 3. Cloud’s mental breakdown remains one of the big highlights of FFVII.

Going back to the idea of “character vs avatar,” although obviously Cloud is supposed to be a stoic badass, the game really hammers in the idea that Cloud is not a stoic badass at heart. As early as Wall Market, the story won’t progress unless Cloud emasculates himself by wearing women’s clothes. Also consider how mentally weak the game postures Cloud as during its second act, where he is manipulated by Sephiroth into hurting and almost killing Aerith, and eventually hand delivers the black materia to him.

All this comes to a head when it’s revealed that Cloud wasn’t even SOLDIER first class, but a low-ranking grunt – his weapon, outfit, and mannerisms based on Zack, the actual soldier he’d mistakenly believed himself to be (I haven’t played Crisis Core, so some of this nuance may be lost on me… I’ll play it someday soon).

Although I’m aware the in-game, in-universe reason for this plot contrivance is something to do with the Jenova Project or whatever, it more or less directly translates to Cloud having the Worst Identity Crisis of All Time. From a player’s perspective, however, this might be one of the most unique instances of a game attempting to “bridge the gap,” so to speak, between characters and players – by illustrating the “gap” in question.

Cloud may appear pathetic to an outsider, whose depersonalization is so severe that he genuinely believes himself to be somebody that he isn’t. Does this not feel like the game holding a proverbial mirror up to the player? As if the game is saying, “Hey, you like Cloud, right? You want to be like Cloud? How about now? Do you still want to be like Cloud? You want to pretend to be somebody you’re not?” It is genuinely uncomfortable! What’s even stranger is that Cloud somehow comes out on the other end of this situation as the Undisputed Badass and Cooler Character Than Sephrioth anyways. How he actually defeats Sephiroth at Nibelheim (and later the Northern Crater) cements him as a de facto Badass.

It’s one of those moments where, if you’re a very thorough and detail-oriented person, you might ask yourself what the point of all this even is. Cloud thinking he’s Zack doesn’t really contribute to the overarching plot, I suppose. Cloud is still a Shonen protagonist that can survive being stabbed through the chest, or falling from hundreds of feet, or having his mind broken by an ancient extraterrestrial, etc.

I think it matters because it’s a test of our faith in him.

Although Cloud puts up walls around himself when Sephiroth psychologically assaults him with images of Nibelheim, eventually he starts to crack. Eventually Cloud’s self-perception breaks and he realizes that he wasn’t able to keep his promise to Tifa, allowing Sephiroth to mortally wound her in Nibelheim. Later, we fail to save Aerith, although she’s not as lucky as Tifa and succumbs to her wounds shortly after.

Later on, we learn that Cloud technically does save Tifa and defeats Sephiroth at Nibelheim (at least for the time being), and this revelation restores both our confidence in Cloud, and Cloud’s confidence in himself.

Cloud saves Tifa in the same way Aerith saves the world when her prayer reaches Holy. It’s true that neither Cloud needed to believe he was someone that he wasn’t, nor did Aerith need to die for her prayer to work. These details are intrinsic.

No matter what, “when it's time for this planet to die, you'll understand that you know absolutely nothing… It may be tomorrow, or 100 years from now... But it's not long off.”

There’s this pervasive mood in FFVII that is unlike any other game I’ve played. Especially towards the end when Meteor appears looming overhead. There’s this feeling that our characters are at the end of the world. We’re reminded several times over, too, that no matter what the outcome of our actions here are, the world is going to end sooner or later. We’re only delaying the inevitable. But there’s also the unmistakable matter of fact that if we don’t do anything here and now, there won’t be anything worth fighting for.

So, it’s true the world’s going to end someday. But that doesn’t invalidate the struggles our characters go through. It doesn’t delegitimize the sacrifices they make in order to defeat Sephiroth.

The fact that FFVII may be – at its core – just another JRPG where your objective is to kill God, defy fate, whatever, pales in comparison to the fact that its story, the actual linear sequence of events leading from Midgar to Northern Crater, centers on disparate people coming to terms with their pasts and resolving to fight for a brighter future. That’s what FFVII is all about.

It’s not about Sephiroth, really. It’s not about Jenova or Shinra. These are the stand-ins. Icons for unimaginable destruction. Demons from the past threatening this world’s future.

As Cloud says towards the end of the game, “I think we all are fighting for ourselves. For ourselves...and that someone... something...whatever it is, that's important to us. That's what we're fighting for. That's why we keep up this battle for the planet.”

It’s the culmination of Cloud’s entire character. Beginning as an uncaring mercenary, subsequently intertwined with Avalanche because of Tifa (the only tangible connection he has to his past), creating new connections with Aerith, contending with his past in the form of Sephiroth, and then forced to confront his past(Sephiroth) when it affects his future(Aerith).

From uncaring mercenary to unlikely hero. From first class impostor to saving the world.

As the final battle comes to a head against the One-Winged Angel, Sephiroth himself, the vocal accompaniment – lyrics derived from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana – reminds us that we are not only fighting against Sephritoh, but fate itself. There is an inexplicable feeling that we’re fighting a battle we’ve no chance of winning.

But at this moment, this one spectacular moment – as the Godhead of destruction rends planets and stars from the sky to wipe you and your friends from the face of the Earth – Cloud fights further. Did we push beyond the limits of Godhood? Did we unshackle ourselves from the chains of fate?

Or were we just lucky?

Was this our willpower? Or was it a miracle?

Was it divine intervention? Or was it fate?

The funniest thing happened as Cloud stared down Sephiroth in a black void while I stared down at a flashing, neon rainbow Limit Break icon at full capacity: I didn’t hit the button. Sephiroth took his first swing and Cloud retaliated because I’d equipped the Counter Attack materia – or I thought that’s what saved me. It turns out that Cloud will always counter attack if Sephiroth strikes first in this sequence.

Perhaps ours wasn’t the greater will. Maybe we made it here through determination alone, even if fate deals the final blow.

Maybe this is Sephiroth’s ultimate victory: the gnawing feeling that even after everything, we’re still not done here.

One day, this planet will die. All this returns to nothing.

The post-credits scene, a whopping five hundred years after the initial events of FFVII, sees Red XIII traveling to the ruins of Midgar as nature appears to have long since reclaimed the sprawling megalopolis.

Although fans didn’t receive additional information surrounding the status of FFVII’s main cast until Advent Children (which I have watched) and Dirge of Cerberus (which I have played), the original ending was surprisingly ambiguous. Did anyone survive? Does humanity persist? Is the world on the brink of extinction? Are those echoes we hear as the title card fades into darkness the ghosts of children, or signs of new life?

Even if we know the definitive answer now, there’s a wistful quality to it all. The husk of Midgar is a skeleton. Our characters have long since returned to the Lifestream. Life goes on.

One of the most beautiful, haunting, and iconic stories in the medium to date. If you can forgive the archaic design in some areas, you may even fall in love.

I now understand why this game is so loved by many.

Having only played FF16 beforehand - going into 7 had me doubting Cloud and him being a compelling character like Clive but I was so wrong. Cloud and all the party members have their own backstories and arcs and I was compelled by basically all of them. (except Cait Sith fuck that dumbass cat I do not care if he said some soppy shit at the end to try and remedy his betrayal)

Sephiroth is cool as fuck and the flashbacks involving him, Cloud and Zack were some of my favourite parts of this story. I also really loved the visuals and what they were going for during the Tifa and Cloud Lifestream sequence (very abstract Evangelion-esque which I'm always into), can't wait to see how they re-envision those scenes in the remake.

Music is iconic and everyone knows it, not much I can say on this that hasn't already been said. Battle theme is such a banger holy shit.

My only gripes were mostly gameplay aspects - but it was expected since I'm kinda new to turn based JRPGs. The limited amount of save options which is a product of the game's time, and things every turn based RPGs have which are RNG aspects (FUCK misses) but hopefully as I play more of this genre I'll come to enjoy that stuff, but for now I'm not really into it.

I’ve played through Final Fantasy VII twice now, and I’ve given it a perfect score both times. This surprised me, as I can be a bit apprehensive about games heralded as the best in the medium. Often I find these claims only lead to me being let down. I also tend to lower my scores upon replay, as I like to have an awkward obsession with new things then realize the duller aspects once I fall out of love with them (see my shift in opinion on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild). To top all this off, my opinions on RPG design are more critical than most. I hate feeling lost and without direction in games, and I feel like this flaw is most common within that spectrum of game. With all this considered, Final Fantasy VII truly is timeless, as it turns out.

I’ll start by noting an odd charm carried by the narrative. I would hesitate to call it compelling, but it does have a strange way of grabbing my attention on each playthrough. The overarching story isn’t anything insanely striking. For its legacy to be so defined by its antagonist, Sephiroth is spectacular in every aspect outside of his writing, otherwise feeling stale and under utilized. With all that said, it has a unique feeling to it and combined with the rudimentary (but loveable) visuals, I did end up being interested in what was happening in it. To carry a story on the back of characters and aesthetics alone is notable for any game, let alone a game going for something as new and daring as Final Fantasy VII obviously is. If you’re apprehensive about it, I would recommend jumping into it, taking it as it is, and understand that it doesn’t really expect anything more than your attention. There isn’t much to read into or rip apart with it, but it’s likely to earn a smile (or maybe even some brief pangs of sadness) by the end of it. Somebody clearly cared about the story, and often that’s enough to earn my respect and at least a passing grade from me.

At first glance, I was also intimidated by the idea of the Materia system. It seemed overwhelming, and I disliked the idea of managing a set of complex abilities and individually piecing together which had an edge over others, then investing time and effort into leveling those abilities up. I initially wondered what would happen if I found that a Materia I had invested time into was losing its edge in the late game. What then? Would I be expected to grind a new one up, sacrificing my time and effort for something I would have had no idea I was doing wrong? I was completely off, and I really should get over developing such harsh preconceptions. I found by the end that experimenting with new abilities and playing around with all the Materia felt natural and fun. I made mistakes with my setups and strategies, but never felt I was being cheated by the game for not arbitrarily selecting the Materia it wanted me to at any one point. Failure meant learning more about the abilities, which was exciting and kept the combat interesting to the very last fight. This is a pretty landmark victory in design, and certainly knocked me on my ass. I have lots of praise to sing for this system. Have fun with it, it’s great.

The visuals are inspired and a lot of thought went into bringing this game to life. It really pops, even to this day, and provides a beautiful glimpse into how creative this industry once had to be in order to conquer the mountain of problems that came with three dimensions. Alongside this, the soundtrack is phenomenal, and seriously helps the game in conveying what it wants to. The text boxes come with no audio or voice acting (obviously) so the soundtrack becomes imperative in characterizing the interactions between the characters and their environment. This really helped my connection to the game, so the degree of success it found here is one I have a great deal of admiration for.

I suppose at the end of it all Final Fantasy VII wins on its creativity above all else. With this game’s remake receiving the reception it did, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the current industry trend, and my connection to this game is partially influenced by this. At the end of it all I worry about losing what’s exemplified in this game's design to the ever-present ideals of optimization and improvement. This game isn’t going to win any modernity contests anytime soon, that much is clear, but I still have a strong appreciation for how this game handled itself. That isn’t a slight against Final Fantasy VII Remake or any of its prospective sequels, of which I judge according to their own merit, rather it’s my own worry that those games are intended to replace the original in some way. I don’t think translating art to be more modern is an improvement over the original, and that line of thinking might present a danger to the philosophies that attracted me to games as an artistic medium for expression in the first place..

But I’m also aging like anyone else, and past a certain level of aging you just start liking old shit. Whoops. It happened to me too.

Also hey sorry for the review, next one will be a sentence long again don’t worry.

Up until last week, I had never played Final Fantasy VII. I'm not exactly much of a JRPG person. But one thing has fascinated for the last few years, and that was the discourse surrounding Final Fantasy VII Remake, namely rather than being a retelling of the original game's story, it introduced changes and new elements that turned it into more of a commentary on Final Fantasy VII and its impact. Anyone who's followed my reviews on here and other sites can probably guess that this kind of discourse immediately put the remake on my radar.

Like I said earlier, though, I'm not much of a JRPG player. However, I knew that if I was going to play Final Fantasy VII Remake, I needed to play the original Final Fantasy VII first so I could appreciate it on its own before diving into the remake and trying to decipher what exactly its changes and additions meant. Which meant playing 30+ hours of one of my least favorite types of games: a turn-based RPG.

For what it's worth, Final Fantasy VII, despite being such a formative staple of the genre, actually uses a system that separates it from a typical turn-based RPG. The "active time battle" system means every individual character and enemy's turn is dictated by an individual timer rather than waiting until every single player on the field has acted. Which means that while you're busy choosing actions for one character, the enemy is already recovering and might attack you before you finish.

This system didn't really grip me at first, it seemed like a useless change that didn't solve my two issues when it comes to turn-based RPGs: my own impatience and the inability to truly react to your opponent. Impatience is self-explanatory, but by "inability to react" I am referring to the fact that when an enemy does an attack, you have no real way of intercepting or countering, you will simply get hit and there's nothing you can do about it unless there's a chance it misses or something. Of course, the player has the same advantage against enemies, but the "fairness" of the design doesn't change how frustrating it feels when an enemy just suddenly busts out a move that you couldn't have anticipated and ruins the fight for reasons that were basically out of your control because you couldn't have taken it into account on a previous turn.

Active time battle, again, isn't actually that much of a solution. There's still a lot of sitting through animations, so it's not as if battles are actually quicker than in a typical turn-based RPG. And for the most part, because the game pauses during certain animations, you're still not afforded the freedom to react. I pretty much hated the combat system for the entirety of Midgar, a 6-hour "prologue" of sorts. That is, until, I finally reached battles challenging enough where I was being asked to consider healing not just between fights, but during. In a regular turn-based RPG, when a character is low on health, although it's kind of scary, it's not truly a big deal, you just go into the menu and use a potion or have your healing character cast a spell. Your only worry is if you'll be able to heal enough to withstand the next attack, which usually isn't a problem.

In Final Fantasy VII, every frame you spend in a menu brings the enemy an inch closer to attacking again. So you don't just have to heal, you have to heal fast. Some battles got so frantic to the point where my optimal strategy genuinely came to be giving every single character a Restore Materia just to make sure I could not possibly miss a chance to heal. This worked to an extent, but once certain bosses started to whip out attacks that hit the whole party, even this lost its usefulness. The solution to this problem is where some aspects of the game's age began to show.

As with a lot of old games, sometimes the tutorializing is suboptimal. One flaw in Final Fantasy VII in this regard is how poorly it explains the Materia system, which essentially allows you to equip magic and various other abilities to characters. This is good on its own, but Materia's real power is meant to shine when you pair it with support Materia that augments it. But the actual text explaining what these support Materia items do is not always very clear. I genuinely did not consider that "All" Materia was referring to area-of-effect until the walkthrough I was using mentioned how useful it would be for an upcoming fight. It's almost essential that you have at least one character with a Restore Materia augmented by an All Materia or else you simply will not be able to prevent your party from getting wiped in some fights.

Once I realized this, of course, the game instantly became more fun. Suddenly I found myself rushing to queue up a party heal during an enemy's lengthy attack animation when I knew significant damage was coming up. It's the closest a turn-based RPG has ever come to emulating the feeling of an action game, and for that, I do have to respect the design at play, especially for a game from the 90s where I wouldn't have expected such deviation from the norm.

But enough about the gameplay. Although that certainly will be a point of comparison I have to consider when it comes to Final Fantasy VII Remake, obviously the main thing I'm here to compare is the story. So, what do I think of the story of Final Fantasy VII, one of the most highly regarded, iconic, and influential video game narratives of all time? Dear readers, I desperately wanted to have a hot take here, I cannot help but enjoy being a contrarian sometimes. But only when I'm honest about it. And here, my honest statement is - it's almost as good as people say. Not flawless, as we'll get to later, but it lives up to its reputation.

Final Fantasy VII is most well-known for its strong environmentalist themes, and that's evident almost immediately. Shinra, both a major corporation and the primary government of Final Fantasy VII's world, powers the world's technology through a substance known as "Mako", but the production of Mako is slowly killing the planet. Our protagonist, Cloud, finds himself in the fight against Shinra alongside two of our other main characters, Barret and Tifa, in the resistance group AVALANCHE just before the game begins. Although Cloud isn't much of a believer in the cause, AVALANCHE's goal is to stop Shinra from killing the planet by any means necessary. The first several hours take place entirely within the Shinra capital of Midgar as Cloud, Barret, and Tifa fight Shinra and attempt to protect their new friend Aeris who the Shinra are after.

Although I had not played Final Fantasy VII before, I did absorb a lot of discourse over the years. One criticism I've heard is that these those environmentalist themes sort of fall by the wayside after the group leaves Midgar, especially since towards the end of Midgar they lean more heavily into more traditional fantasy instead of the more sci-fi approach the early hours took. I think it is fair to say that the game certainly expands beyond that laser focus we see in the Midgar section, but I would argue everything those opening hours establishes still remains at the heart of the story for almost the entirety of the dozens of hours it takes to beat the game.

For one thing, Shinra's influence is still felt beyond Midgar. They are the government of almost the entire known world, after all, and will constantly interfere with our heroes along every step of their journey. Not to mention, their Mako reactors are everywhere. On top of that, even the more fantastical elements connect to Shinra. A crucial plot device to the world of Final Fantasy VII is the Lifestream, the combined sum of all the planet's life energy. All living things are born from the Lifestream, and everything that dies returns to the Lifestream. The reason the production of Mako causes such harm to the environment is because it essentially "uses up" the Lifestream's energy, leaving it unable to return to its source and disrupting that fundamental cycle.

And then we have the main antagonist, Sephiroth. Sephiroth himself is the product of a Shinra experiment, and now intends to destroy the world upon learning the truth of his nature. Although, he learns two different stories. The first being that he is the son of Jenova, one of the Ancients, also known as the Cetra. The Cetra were a nomadic people deeply in tune with the Planet and the Lifestream, but were wiped out in a catastrophe, abandoned to their fate by humans who chose the path of remaining in one place, destroying the environment and harming the Planet for the sake of building their cities. Sephiroth's reaction to this version of events is one of vengeance, wanting to punish humanity for their crimes against the Cetra and the Planet as a whole. Although most of this story ends up being untrue, it immediately justifies the pivot from Shinra as the primary antagonist to Sephiroth, as Sephiroth becomes more than just a singular figure, but this manifestation of all of humanity's sins coming back to haunt them.

However, the truth of the matter comes slightly later. "Jenova" is not a Cetra, nor is it Sephiroth's real mother. Rather, it's an alien entity that crashed down on the planet two thousand years ago, the "calamity from the skies" that brought about the aforementioned end of the Cetra before it was eventually defeated, leaving Aeris' family line the last remnant of her entire race. Sephiroth was created when his pregnant mother was injected with Jenova's cells by his father, Hojo, though Sephiroth does still seem to believe he is the direct offspring of Jenova. Regardless, he is aware of Jenova's true nature, and now seeks to finish what it started and kill the world, so that when the Lifestream attempts to "heal" the dying Planet, he can absorb its energy and rule the new world as God.

This new backstory and motvation does still have its merits. It makes Sephiroth an interesting parallel to our main protagonist. Cloud is a former soldier constantly looking up to others. First his hero Sephiroth, then his friend in some nebulous, undefined war, Zack, who would eventually die at the hands of Sephiroth. Cloud, though injected with Jenova's cells in an attempt to recreate Shinra's perfect soldier Sephiroth, never ended living up to his heights. He wasn't even as good as Zack. He was a failure destined to remain a nobody. So when he reunites with his friend Tifa a few years after the tragedy that destroyed his hometown and left him traumatized, he sort of tricks himself into believing Zack's feats were his own. Not maliciously, since he seems to believe the lie himself, but it's a lie nonetheless. Cloud is full of self-doubt, and he doesn't know who he is or who he wants to be, so it's easy for him to just want to be someone else.

Sephiroth, on the other hand, believes he knows exactly who he is. Sure, it's a momentary crisis when he learns he might be some kind of science experiment, but this only fills him with new drive, new purpose. Him being the product of an alien bent on destroying all life on the Planet doesn't give him pause, make him doubt what he's fighting for. Instead, it only makes him more sure of himself. Gives him a sense of destiny. He was brought into this world to become the God his "mother" never could, and he will stop at nothing until he achieves it. Such certainty is born from tremendous ego, literally exerting his will over that of the entire Planet.

Thus ends up being ironic in two ways. The first is that said ego gives him more in common with the Shinra and the humans he detests than he realizes, prioritizing his own ends over the good of all life on the Planet. The second is that as we learn, Jenova's cells exert subconscious influence over everyone who has them, slowly desiring to converge and resume Jenova's mission. Although I don't believe it's ever stated, there's no reason to believe Sephiroth is any exception. His entire sense of self is likely a myth. A puppet of Jenova's will, mistakenly believing his desires to be his own, much like Cloud did with his fallen friend Zack.

But as I alluded to a moment ago, I don't think this second version of Sephiroth's backstory is quite as tight and cohesive as the first one. I do think it is still, overall, the better choice for the story, I don't think they should have had the original version of events turn out to be the truth. Otherwise the game doesn't really have much more of interest to say than "humans are destroying the planet and that's bad." It's true, obviously, but what would fighting Sephiroth really represent other than saying that the entire human race doesn't deserve to be punished? That being said, there is something to be said about humanity's selfishness allowed them to turn a blind eye to the dying Planet, and how Sephiroth being a descendant of one of the Cetra, the people who wanted so desperately to protect it, turns him into more than an individual. How his evil is not born only from within, but from all the problems the world has been facing for the last two thousand years.

The truth of Jenova, this alien being from outside of the Planet, kind of undermines this. Jenova is a complete outsider. This is a very text-heavy game, so maybe I missed something, but it's not really explained what Jenova is, exactly, other than some sort of parasitic alien. I think this ambiguity is a strength, to be clear, but what does Jenova really represent in the context of the environmentalist themes? It's not born from the Planet, nor the abuse of the Lifestream by humanity. So for Sephiroth to be enacting Jenova's ends, either as a puppet or just trying to finish what it started, we sort of lose his connection to most of those environmentalist themes. Humanity's only real involvement in creating Sephiroth, in turning him into the man he is, is Hojo's experiments. The fault now rests entirely on individuals, rather than a broader societal failure.

This issue is compounded by the reveal of the way Sephiroth intends to end the world and remake it as God, a visual from the game so iconic it's part of the logo - Meteor. You would think at this point in the game, especially with Shinra being a presence, you'd want to find some way of tying these two threads back together. Shinra is killing the Planet through its actions, and now Sephiroth wants to kill the world so he can remake it in its last moments of life. What Shinra is doing accidentally (or rather, as a side effect of their actions that they're willing to ignore) Sephiroth intends to do with intent and malice. But it turns out, rather than killing the Planet through any of the means by which it's already dying, instead he's relying on some Cetra magic from thousands of years ago that also conveniently has planet-killing capabilities.

Obviously, I get why this happened. For one thing, going into the second half of the story, it certainly raises the stakes to have this singular impending event of destruction. And within the rules of the fiction, Sephiroth's method of destroying the world needs to preserve what energy remains in the Lifestream, which means if he destroyed the world with Mako reactors or a similar process, he wouldn't be able to become God, everything would just die forever.

But I think an answer was staring them in the face here. Perhaps this will get a bit fanfic-y, me suggesting a rewrite to a game that is nearly three decades old now. But at the same time, Square Enix and Tetsuya Nomura are clearly willing to spend millions and millions of dollars and most of the 2020s on essentially telling a high-budget fanfic rewrite of the original game, so I think I'm afforded that right in this review, too.

So, Sephiroth obviously can't just will something as powerful as Meteor into existence. As we learn shortly after the reveal of its existence, it requires a powerful catalyst known as Black Materia. In the world of Final Fantasy VII, Materia can be formed in two ways. The most common one is as one of many byproducts of Mako production, making Shinra the world's primary supplier of Materia. But also, rarely, the Lifestream's energy crystallizes on its own, which is how Materia was created and used before the time of Shinra. The oldest and most powerful of these Materia are the Black Materia and the White Materia. The White Materia is used to cast Holy, a powerful spell that essentially allows the Planet to do whatever it believes is necessary to protect the Lifestream. Black Materia, on the other hand, has the sole purpose of destruction, hence its use in summoning the world-ending Meteor.

But what if the Black Materia wasn't this ancient thing that had always existed? What if it was moreso a theoretical possibility, a thing the Planet warned about but did not come to be in the time of the Cetra? In the game, the Black Materia takes the form of an entire temple, but can be shrunk down into a usable size by completing various puzzles. This explanation is pulled almost entirely out of thin air. It's not clear how or why the Cetra built a temple out of Black Materia or how they were able to grow and shrink it like that. And I get it's magic, but this entire thing is basically born out of nowhere basically just to justify a single (admittedly important) character beat for Shinra double agent Cait Sith.

But let's say none of that happened, and once the characters learn about Black Materia, it doesn't turn out that they're already conveniently standing inside of it. Instead, it's a theoretical thing that they just know Sephiroth believes exists somewhere in the world. Where, or rather what, could the Black Materia be in this hypothetical alternate version of events? And how could it better tie into the Shinra story thread and its associated themes?

Well, all Materia is just the Lifestream's energy condensed, right? And Shinra is using the Lifestream's energy to create Mako. And here we're already telling an environmentalist story where the production of that energy is sucking the life out of the planet. What if, much like in our own world, some energy sources produce toxic waste that can cause ecological damage, Mako produces waste of its own? Spoiled energy from the Planet, unable to return to the Lifestream, left to fester on its own and, much like ordinary Materia, gradually crystalize? Rather than some random temple, this could be your Black Materia.

It's clear that the "Black" in the name isn't just referring to color, but a more metaphysical darkness or corruption. So it being born from Mako, itself a perversion of the Lifestream certainly seems logical to me. It just feels so much more impactful when I imagine that the catalyst that Sephiroth needs to end the world is something that is, once again, born from humanity's abuse of nature. Instead, it just isn't really explained why Black Materia (and the subsequent world-ending spell it casts) exists. It just does. A meaningless macguffin that the characters can toss around before it finally ends up in Sephiroth's hands once and for all, with absolutely no greater narrative significance.

And this isn't a problem because I need magic to have an explanation inherently or anything, but rather, the obligatory nature of Black Materia's existence is sort of the final nail in the coffin in terms of how the game's Sephiroth and Shinra threads don't really tie together by the end, despite being so intrinsically linked from the start. Because without this, there is absolutely nothing about Sephiroth's entire goal that has anything to do with the ecological consequences of Shinra or humanity's lifestyle. Hojo would still be a mad scientist trying to create super soldiers with Jenova's cells no matter what, which would always inevitably lead to a Sephiroth trying to finish what Jenova started long before humanity turned their backs on the Planet.

So hopefully this overly long detour about a seemingly small and insignificant plot device like Black Materia made sense by the end. It's not that Black Materia is the only way they could have fixed the problem, but it certainly seems like the most obvious one. Sephiroth's destruction being born from humanity's mistakes would even enhance the ambiguous ending. The game literally cuts to credits at the climax of this clash between Holy, a spell born of the will of humanity fighting for the Planet's future, and Meteor. If Meteor worked a little bit more like I suggested, then it becomes this metaphorical collision of the best and worst of humanity, and you're left to decide for yourself which one the Planet deemed representative of the fate of the human race. (Though, while I haven't seen Advent Children, the very existence of a proper sequel narrative set before the game's epilogue seems to definitively answer this question.)

Hopefully amidst all my complaining, I don't come across like I dislike this story, or that it doesn't deserve the legacy it has. But not even the most iconic stories are beyond criticism. That the game presented such strong ideas and themes that I was even able to talk about it in this much detail should be a testament to just how much of a landmark this was for video game storytelling. It's not some bad story because it got a few things wrong, it's a great game because of just how much it got right. It raised the bar for a reason, and I'm only more curious to see what exactly such a drastic remake of this game looks like now.